Los Angeles, CA (October 26, 2009) – Legacy Effects, one of Hollywood’s most respected special makeup and animatronic effects companies, brings its famed design skills to the small screen of the Apple iPhone and iTouch with the release of its first iPhone App, “iMut8r”. The new App allows users to take photos of friends and family and transform or “mut8” them into their own custom versions of classic creatures and monsters.

After importing images from their library or taking new photos, the images are easily resized and repositioned. The fun begins when you start augmenting the photo with an almost endless combination of eyes, ears, noses, cheeks brows, hair and other character and creature facial features. The photo manipulator makes excellent use of its high-end designs by allowing the end user to mix and match different facial features and blend them into the photo with a slick fade feature. Like its professional makeup creators, this feature makes some of the blends and transitions nearly invisible to the eye, and the end result is a “mut8d” photo that looks like it’s straight from the latest Hollywood Monster Movie!

The App is the brain child of Alan Scott, Legacy co-owner and long time mac user, and was led by Legacy Digital System Engineer Jason Lopes. Inspired to bring Oscar caliber makeup design to the masses in a fun and exciting way, Scott and Lopes set out to create an App like no other. A 6-man design team created the app from scratch in about 3 weeks and submitted the programming chores to Lopes and Jeshua Lacock. “This was an extremely challenging and rewarding project to be able to take film quality images and Character design and apply it to the Apple iPhone” says Lopes. The end result is worth every penny of the $0.99 charged for the app.

iMut8r allows the user to spend a haunting amount of time taking lively images and turning them into ghoulish portraits. Creative, fun, and just in time for Halloween, iMut8r takes the power of Hollywood special effects and places them right at the fingertips of iPhone users. Future versions are already in the works, and other exciting Apps are already in development at Legacy.

ABOUT LEGACY EFFECTS:
Legacy Effects is an award winning full service character design, make-up and animatronic studio that is responsible for the creation of many memorable and iconic character for feature films, commercials and music videos. Their work can be seen in current and upcoming feature films such as Avatar, Iron Man II, Shutter Island, Alice in Wonderland, and Thor. The owners have been nominated for an Academy Award ® for Iron Man and have supervised famous films such as Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgement day, and Jurassic Park to name a few.

In addition to feature films, Legacy Effects also has a highly successful commercial division.  The team worked on over 220 commercials in 2008 alone, and has been instrumental in creating such major client icons as the AFLAC Duck, the Budweiser Frogs and Lizards, Burger King’s “King”, Jack Link’s Sasquatch, and the Chef Boyardee Troll.

Managing the company as partners and owners are veteran effects supervisors John Rosengrant, Shane Mahan, Alan Scott and Lindsay Macgowan. They supervised at Stan Winston Studio, and continue as Legacy Effects to collaborate with directors such as Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Tim Burton, Jon Favreau and Martin Scorsese. They have supervised the effects for some of the largest-grossing films of all time, either for Legacy Effects, or for their previous employer, mentor and special effects wiz, Stan Winston. They are extremely excited about working with the Apple SDK, and look forward to helping iPhone users everywhere become character designers themselves.